GTA V PC Performance Thread

Alright, I gave this command line a try. Very, very small improvement. Hardly noticeable.

So as it stands, the stuttering was reduced slightly by restoring CPU clocks to default, and the hyperthreading barely did anything. After doing some reading, I'm not 100% convinced this isn't some kind of a memory management issue. I failed to mention my Pagefile settings earlier; my C drive (my SSD) is set to 'System managed' as per a suggestion from another GTA V performance-related thread. Could this be wrong and should I actually set it to some custom size? I should note that 'system managed' is only for my SSD. My HDD Pagefile is set to something like 20,000 for initial and maximum size....if that's even worth mentioning.

Still don't really understand these pagefile values. Somebody mentioned that setting their pagefile to their SSD cleared up their stutter. Does this mean that they just selected 'no paging file' for their HDD and put in arbitrary values for the SSD pagefile?
Leave pagefile as managed by system and put one ONLY ON YOUR SSD. You are potentially gimping your performance by having a split pagefile on a HDD. I would recommend removing the HDD pagefile. I'm not sure why you even have that set. It sounds like you've done a lot of tweaking without knowing what you're doing or had it set up by someone else. I highly recommend putting everything (CPU, GPU, system settings) all back to defaults until you're certain that everything works well.

EDIT: In fact, reading up on pagefiles, it seems that Windows prioritizes the pagefile on the least used drive, thus, in your case, probably the HDD. This means that you are definitely gimping performance by having a pagefile on your HDD rather than just on your SSD.
 
Leave pagefile as managed by system and put one ONLY ON YOUR SSD. You are potentially gimping your performance by having a split pagefile on a HDD. I would recommend removing the HDD pagefile. I'm not sure why you even have that set. It sounds like you've done a lot of tweaking without knowing what you're doing or had it set up by someone else. I highly recommend putting everything (CPU, GPU, system settings) all back to defaults until you're certain that everything works well.

EDIT: In fact, reading up on pagefiles, it seems that Windows prioritizes the pagefile on the least used drive, thus, in your case, probably the HDD. This means that you are definitely gimping performance by having a pagefile on your HDD rather than just on your SSD.

I appreciate the straightforward response. I was never very clear about how pagefile worked. I did as you advised, but again there was no discernible difference in the stutter so I suppose that rules out the Pagefile being the issue here.
 
Still don't really understand these pagefile values. Somebody mentioned that setting their pagefile to their SSD cleared up their stutter. Does this mean that they just selected 'no paging file' for their HDD and put in arbitrary values for the SSD pagefile?

Basically there is never any good reason to mess with the pagefile except putting it on your fastest drive. There are people who change it to a minimum size because they think it will then prefer RAM but the engineers at MS are not exactly stupid so you'd think they'd know how to do pagefile caching.

For performance there is usually no good reason to disable or alter the pagefile size. Just set one page file on your fastest drive with a system managed size. For example my fastest drive is my 1 TB Samsung 840 EVO SSD which is where I store games etc. I also have an older OCZ Agility 3 128 GB drive as an OS drive but the Samsung is definitely faster so I put my pagefile on that drive. There really wasn't any perceivable difference between the two drives in my case, but if you have a SSD and HDD, put it on the SSD.
 
I appreciate the straightforward response. I was never very clear about how pagefile worked. I did as you advised, but again there was no discernible difference in the stutter so I suppose that rules out the Pagefile being the issue here.

I forgot to mention why removing your CPU overclock might help. Most games are not CPU intensive whereas GTA V is very CPU heavy (but for what seems to be good reasons rather than just unoptimized), thus GTA V can really test whether your CPU overclock is actually stable or not. When an overclock is not stable, in the best cases, your computer experiences many small errors that it can correct for without crashing but this slows down the operation. In the worst cases, it will crash when the CPU is stressed. Most people will recommend testing an overclock by running a CPU stress test program like Prime95 over night which reports errors.

I went through your post history to see if you mentioned your specs and I noticed you checked temperatures already so that's good. Raising the available voltage on your GPU might help with stability if you happen to be right on the line of a stable overclock (much like what I mention for CPUs above). I think you mentioned that you already tried resetting the GPU to stock and that didn't help so you've tried that already. You've already tried turning off vsync so it's probably not a monitor sync issue and you've checked temperatures so it doesn't seem to be that.

This is the only thing I can think of at this point that might help: have you ever had another GPU in your system other than the 980 and/or do you do full driver cleans when you upgrade your graphics drivers? Having driver conflicts will gimp your video card. Whenever someone upgrades their GPU or graphics drivers, I highly recommend uninstalling the old drivers and then cleaning them up with Display Driver Uninstaller (http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html), and then installing the latest drivers. Both Nvidia and AMD still have problems when it comes to upgrading/uninstalling their drivers.
 
Is there a size or length limit for the .mp3s you place in the User Music directory? I placed 6 podcasts in the directory and every time I scan for my music it finds 0 files.
 
Is there a size or length limit for the .mp3s you place in the User Music directory? I placed 6 podcasts in the directory and every time I scan for my music it finds 0 files.

You have to load your game first. And when you're actually playing, then scan again. That worked for me, at least.
 
I forgot to mention why removing your CPU overclock might help. Most games are not CPU intensive whereas GTA V is very CPU heavy (but for what seems to be good reasons rather than just unoptimized), thus GTA V can really test whether your CPU overclock is actually stable or not. When an overclock is not stable, in the best cases, your computer experiences many small errors that it can correct for without crashing but this slows down the operation. In the worst cases, it will crash when the CPU is stressed. Most people will recommend testing an overclock by running a CPU stress test program like Prime95 over night which reports errors.

These are exactly the kind of explanations I'm looking for on here. Much, much appreciated.

This is the only thing I can think of at this point that might help: have you ever had another GPU in your system other than the 980 and/or do you do full driver cleans when you upgrade your graphics drivers? Having driver conflicts will gimp your video card. Whenever someone upgrades their GPU or graphics drivers, I highly recommend uninstalling the old drivers and then cleaning them up with Display Driver Uninstaller (http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html), and then installing the latest drivers. Both Nvidia and AMD still have problems when it comes to upgrading/uninstalling their drivers.

I previously had an R9 280X, and doing full driver cleans is something I just started doing fairly recently. I hadn't assigned much importance to it before, but this was before I realized it was an absolute necessity. It's possible a lack of doing so in the past has taken its toll. As far as I know the old drivers were uninstalled completely through DDU, but I'll investigate this further. I'll also try upping the voltage a tad on my GPU overclock, as per your suggestion.
 
I dont suppose anyone know's of a fix for fluctuating frame rates that sometime get stuck at 30, and yet even when the frame rate drops to 50 it doesnt feel right it stutters and jumps all over the place.
 
My GTA V has been running fine since launch, but I opened it tonight and in online it's suddenly stuttering like crazy. Did something happen in a recent patch that could have affected my game?
 
I dont suppose anyone know's of a fix for fluctuating frame rates that sometime get stuck at 30, and yet even when the frame rate drops to 50 it doesnt feel right it stutters and jumps all over the place.

My GTA V has been running fine since launch, but I opened it tonight and in online it's suddenly stuttering like crazy. Did something happen in a recent patch that could have affected my game?

I've found that this sometimes randomly happens when I first start GTA V. You can try alt+tabbing to see if that gets rid of it. Other times, I just need to restart my computer and then it's fine.
 
I get good FPS with a 660 but I'm looking to get some extra oomph out of my rig considering my CPU and mobo just got upgraded.

I've heard that there are issues with 980s not being able to utilize all of the VRAM on the card due to a hardware issue (?) also they are far too pricey for my budget right now.

Would a 780 or perhaps a 970 or 960 be a good alternative? I don't know much about AMD/ATI cards so I have no clue what would be good from them.
 
I get good FPS with a 660 but I'm looking to get some extra oomph out of my rig considering my CPU and mobo just got upgraded.

I've heard that there are issues with 980s not being able to utilize all of the VRAM on the card due to a hardware issue (?) also they are far too pricey for my budget right now.

Would a 780 or perhaps a 970 or 960 be a good alternative? I don't know much about AMD/ATI cards so I have no clue what would be good from them.
You're thinking of the 970 with the memory issue but honestly, I think the issue is pretty overblown. I have a non ti 780 by the way and it runs the game very well at near max settings (ultra grass still brings framerates down below 60 at 1920x1080, depending on the area). A 970 would be the better buy though between the 2 because its faster and probably cheaper (do they even still sell the 780 nowadays?)
 
on their end you mean?

Yes because it's crappy for everyone. GTA Online, when it's working, is wonderful but it's mired in one of the most tedious systems for choosing game modes and match-making. The only way that this system makes sense is if you form one large group of players and then don't mind playing one random mode after another through the very limited voting system, otherwise you end up spending tons of time driving to the particular activity you want to do, waiting for people to join your game, re-joining an open world server when you're done, and repeating.

Heists feel tacked on to this already bad system. Why must you leave your party and re-join the open world after every heist mission? Why does it take so long for Lester to message you to continue the heist series? Then you have to wait for everyone to rejoin, assuming that they even saw the invite amidst all of the notifications going on and that they remembered the name of the host so that they accept the right invite.

It's like they were thinking to make things realistic where players finish the heist and need to go their separate ways to lay low/lose heat (thus load into the open world) but then let them magically teleport back into the next heist with these same people nearly right away! Basically, it seems like they're trying for realism but end up contradicting it in a way that makes the realistic element irrelevant and annoying.
 
Yes because it's crappy for everyone. GTA Online, when it's working, is wonderful but it's mired in one of the most tedious systems for choosing game modes and match-making. The only way that this system makes sense is if you form one large group of players and then don't mind playing one random mode after another through the very limited voting system, otherwise you end up spending tons of time driving to the particular activity you want to do, waiting for people to join your game, re-joining an open world server when you're done, and repeating.

Heists feel tacked on to this already bad system. Why must you leave your party and re-join the open world after every heist mission? Why does it take so long for Lester to message you to continue the heist series? Then you have to wait for everyone to rejoin, assuming that they even saw the invite amidst all of the notifications going on and that they remembered the name of the host so that they accept the right invite.

It's like they were thinking to make things realistic where players finish the heist and need to go their separate ways to lay low/lose heat (thus load into the open world) but then let them magically teleport back into the next heist with these same people nearly right away! Basically, it seems like they're trying for realism but end up contradicting it in a way that makes the realistic element irrelevant and annoying.
Amen.
 
Yes because it's crappy for everyone. GTA Online, when it's working, is wonderful but it's mired in one of the most tedious systems for choosing game modes and match-making. The only way that this system makes sense is if you form one large group of players and then don't mind playing one random mode after another through the very limited voting system, otherwise you end up spending tons of time driving to the particular activity you want to do, waiting for people to join your game, re-joining an open world server when you're done, and repeating.

Heists feel tacked on to this already bad system. Why must you leave your party and re-join the open world after every heist mission? Why does it take so long for Lester to message you to continue the heist series? Then you have to wait for everyone to rejoin, assuming that they even saw the invite amidst all of the notifications going on and that they remembered the name of the host so that they accept the right invite.

It's like they were thinking to make things realistic where players finish the heist and need to go their separate ways to lay low/lose heat (thus load into the open world) but then let them magically teleport back into the next heist with these same people nearly right away! Basically, it seems like they're trying for realism but end up contradicting it in a way that makes the realistic element irrelevant and annoying.

This is exactly how I feel. I hate waiting at the clouds to get in to heists/setups/missions and when logging in to GTA Online. It's so annoying when sometimes I wait for a couple of minutes loading to get in to GTA Online and suddenly I'm greeted with "could not connect/could't find server, switching back to GTA V single player" (sometimes this happens many times in a row). I hope Rockstar would have made a proper "online UI" for the online modes too, at least a server list so I could choose not to go in a server in which there are only 3 people playing, even after changing session for 5 times.
 
I've found that this sometimes randomly happens when I first start GTA V. You can try alt+tabbing to see if that gets rid of it. Other times, I just need to restart my computer and then it's fine.

I think I've found the problem, the in game vsync is a pile of crap. Enabled nvidia driver vsync and it's much smoother and doesnt get stuck at 30 sometimes.
 
I think I've found the problem, the in game vsync is a pile of crap. Enabled nvidia driver vsync and it's much smoother and doesnt get stuck at 30 sometimes.
I'm using the Nvidia v-sync. Can't remember what the ingame one is like and if it makes any difference.

I still get random stuttering though, and online it can go down to 20fps. Really really annoying. No idea what's wrong.
 
Well what cpu do you have and what GPU?

i5 2500K @ 4.3GHz. No power saving feature enable so max performance all the way.
Neither voltages or clock speeds are dynamically adjusted.
GTX 970, 16GB RAM. Game is installed on a mechanical 7200rpm disk.
So either it's the cpu usage causing it or it might be a high hard page fault resolution time.
Not using a page file at all since I have more than enough free and available memory at all times.
 
I'm using the Nvidia v-sync. Can't remember what the ingame one is like and if it makes any difference.

I still get random stuttering though, and online it can go down to 20fps. Really really annoying. No idea what's wrong.

In-game vsync while gaming on a 60Hz screen makes the image stutter constantly. On a 144Hz screen I'm not really seeing it. Nvidias vsync solves this in any case.
 
For people having random stutters or frame drops when using vsync, you can try to press ALT+ENTER to get in to windowed mode and then pressing ALT+ENTER again to go back to fullscreen mode. I have to do this everytime I launch the game but it fixes all random framedrops/stutters for me.
 
I think I solved my problem with limiting at 30fps. I set power managment mode to prefer maximum performance in the nvidia menu, there seems to be less stutter and frame rate fluctuations now.
 
So far, the game's been running like a dream on my machine. I just stopped caring and let it run at 60fps most of the time with maybe dips here and there in heavily forested areas or in the city. Game's on a mix of very high/high on a I5 4690K , 8GB DDR3 RAM and a 3GB R9 280.
 
For people having random stutters or frame drops when using vsync, you can try to press ALT+ENTER to get in to windowed mode and then pressing ALT+ENTER again to go back to fullscreen mode. I have to do this everytime I launch the game but it fixes all random framedrops/stutters for me.

That does work, also by changing MSAA from 2x then to off, then back again, also gets rid of slow down! Weird.
 
For people having random stutters or frame drops when using vsync, you can try to press ALT+ENTER to get in to windowed mode and then pressing ALT+ENTER again to go back to fullscreen mode. I have to do this everytime I launch the game but it fixes all random framedrops/stutters for me.
It seems like this is messing up AA and turning it off in the process. That's what I figured so far.

I do have this effect every now and then, when my PC decides to ask if it should switch to basic mode to gain better performance...
 
Upping the voltage on my GPU overclock did nothing as well. Also, stuttering is slightly worsened (though maybe not necessarily related to) after making my SSD the only Pagefile. So I'm basically back in the same boat.

That does work, also by changing MSAA from 2x then to off, then back again, also gets rid of slow down! Weird.

I can attest that this does - again, slightly - improve things.
 
I have two macros on my Logitech keyboard set to switching between MSAA (in the city) and FXAA (in the boonies). FXAA looks just fine in rural areas and now I enjoy 60fps at all times nearly entirely maxed out.
 
Yes because it's crappy for everyone. GTA Online, when it's working, is wonderful but it's mired in one of the most tedious systems for choosing game modes and match-making. The only way that this system makes sense is if you form one large group of players and then don't mind playing one random mode after another through the very limited voting system, otherwise you end up spending tons of time driving to the particular activity you want to do, waiting for people to join your game, re-joining an open world server when you're done, and repeating.
Not that the rest of your rant isn't correct but you don't have to drive to any jobs. You can just host one from the start menu.
 
That does work, also by changing MSAA from 2x then to off, then back again, also gets rid of slow down! Weird.

Changing certain settings lowers VRAM usage temporarily according to the MSI Afterburner OSD. I'll go from 1.9 GB to around 1.7GB, eliminating stutter until it eventually climbs high enough again. Sometimes the usage will drop down automatically, sometimes it'll stay high. Memory leak?
 
Still self radio stutter.... sighs.. I WANT TO LISTEN TO THE NEW TAYLOR SWIFT ALBUM whilst driving on the mountain tops.

Games doing you a favor. Heyooooooo.

I never noticed stutter but I don't use the radio too often. Is this still pretty common? I know I've heard others mention it too.
 
So can anyone confirm to me that this is normal in a of game? Every straight object (like telephone poles, straight lines in a fence and power lines, but also hair) seems to be made up of lines instead of pixels, like a zigzag pattern. Enabling AA fixes a bit of it, but not alnearly everything. Is there a setting on the PC I missed or something? I don't see this behaviour on consoles.

Photograph of the screen included since it doesn't show up in screenshots.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0u2wyii2x02xevi/photo%2018-05-15%2017%2047%2008.jpg?dl=0
 
So can anyone confirm to me that this is normal in a of game? Every straight object (like telephone poles and power lines, but also hair) seems to be made up of lines instead of pixels, like a zigzag pattern. Enabling AA fixes a bit of it, but not alnearly everything. Is there a setting on the PC I missed or something? I don't see this behaviour on consoles.

Photograph of the screen included since it doesn't show up in screenshots.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/0u2wyii2x02xevi/photo%2018-05-15%2017%2047%2008.jpg?dl=0

That's dithering, it's a quirk of Rockstar's game engine. MFAA and TXAA supposedly reduce it more than other options, but I don't think there's any way to get rid of it entirely.
 
That's dithering, it's a quirk of Rockstar's game engine. MFAA and TXAA supposedly reduce it more than other options, but I don't think there's any way to get rid of it entirely.

Thank you for the quick response. Have been difficult finding information on this and have been seeing it on multiple games. Guess I'll be enabling AA whenever I upgrade my 970 :)

I presume this dithering is also the cause of those weird "boxy" transparent objects that render before the final object renders? (If that is at all clear).
 
Can anybody explain to me what motion blur does? It doesn't seem to do anything on my end.

I would like to try the game at 30fps, but running at half sync without a decent motion blur is painful. I have my blur slider up to full and yet no discernible effect. For example, standing in front of a vertical post or wall edge and turning left/right all I see are clear edges instead of blur.

Any body have any info regards this?
 
So since I'm back to the drawing board, does anyone have any further suggestions? The only thing I can think of at this point is upgrading to Windows 8.1 - if this even improves performance at all for GTA 5. The other, of course, would be to upgrade my CPU. Otherwise, my options are running thin here. Eliminating this stutter certainly isn't foremost in my problems to be tackled, but it's certainly an annoyance...and at this point it's become a matter of principle lol.
 
So since I'm back to the drawing board, does anyone have any further suggestions? The only thing I can think of at this point is upgrading to Windows 8.1 - if this even improves performance at all for GTA 5. The other, of course, would be to upgrade my CPU. Otherwise, my options are running thin here. Eliminating this stutter certainly isn't foremost in my problems to be tackled, but it's certainly an annoyance...and at this point it's become a matter of principle lol.

I feel your frustration my man.

Did you try playing after a clean Windows boot? ( via MSconfig )
 
Very good to know. Thanks. For other owners of the MSI 970 100ME Edition. My settings in afterburner are as follows:

Reached clocks: 1528 / 1951 (as shown in gpu-z)
Firestrike results: 10508

Core voltage +40 (lower decreases core clock to 1516 and higher does nothing, doesn't even increase voltage anymore according to gpu-z. Max is at 1.2560)
Core clock +200
Mem clock +400.

Could probably up the core even more, but why would I if I never drop under 60 in any game now. Had 1546 at +240 core and that gave me enough power to lock 60 with very high grass, but titanfall would cause driver crashes. On these levels everything is fine and runs very well. This clock gives me +10 fps in gta v and +13 in BF4. I'd say this is an awesome thing.

Btw; some people seem to like the ASIC number, so I'll post that as well: 65,8%.

Running an i5-4690K at stock speeds. Have tried 4.2Ghz but the temps increase to 75 from 58. So meh not really that interesting (this is with an aftermarket cooler). Was surprised to see that my b85 motherboard could do that so I tried, but as I've said; didn't notice a huge gain in games. (Benchmarks did have s very big gain though) and it wouldn't lock the voltage the way I wanted so no trust there.

So yeah. If you own a 970 and a 4690k gta v can be locked at 60 at good settings! Everything very high (grass at high, very high is possible but drops to 55 under certain lightning), soft shadows at softer and msaa off. In advanced extended shadows, high detail streaming and long shadows all turned on.

I hope I helped someone with this :-)

Good job. As you have found out GPU OCing is very safe and easy! Try my settings again with your new clock speeds.
 
Hearing that a lot of people are having the new NVidia drivers crash on them while playing, but for me it's quite the opposite. I was having some major stuttering issues before but now the game is running super silky smooth after I updated my drivers.

I also dropped my Ambient Occlusion from 16x to 8x, but I'm not sure if that's what helped the stutter or not.

The only issue I'm still having is that the game refuses to let me set my refresh rate at 60hz, I'm stuck with two "59hz" options.
 
Upgraded from a 7950 3GB to a GTX 970 and I'm getting terrible performance now. For some reason I'm getting anywhere between 30-50 fps at any given moment. Turned down the game to 800x600 and it still generally ran horribly. Mostly hovered around 50fps but it would shoot up to 70 sometimes in the benchmark
 
Upgraded from a 7950 3GB to a GTX 970 and I'm getting terrible performance now. For some reason I'm getting anywhere between 30-50 fps at any given moment. Turned down the game to 800x600 and it still generally ran horribly. Mostly hovered around 50fps but it would shoot up to 70 sometimes in the benchmark

Probably a driver conflict between your previous AMD drivers and your new Nvidia ones. Uninstall, then clean with Display Driver Uninstaller (http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html) for both AMD and Nvidia, then reinstall the latest Nvidia drivers. See if that helps.
 
Probably a driver conflict between your previous AMD drivers and your new Nvidia ones. Uninstall, then clean with Display Driver Uninstaller (http://www.guru3d.com/files-details/display-driver-uninstaller-download.html) for both AMD and Nvidia, then reinstall the latest Nvidia drivers. See if that helps.

Did that. Seems to have helped a bit but it's still all over the place :x Never a steady 60. Although I noticed that i seem to have problems in other games where I didn't before as well. FF13 for some reason only runs at 30 while not in battle and drops to 20. Skyrim is in the 40s. I seem to be able to run The Witcher 3 at High/Ultra @ 1080p60 though :s

edit: I booted up Skyrim and it automatically set itself to High instead of Ultra. Could I be defaulting to integrated graphics or something?
 
Just confirmed for myself that distance scaling is bugged. There's no difference between 0 and 100 scaling, only extended scaling does anything.

0
gpwb.png


100
hpwb.png


100 extended scaling
jpwb.png
 
I feel your frustration my man.

Did you try playing after a clean Windows boot? ( via MSconfig )

Thank you. I did indeed, and I'm sorry to report it didn't make a difference. I even tried running Windows with all the visual bells and whistles off. I'm going to try this Cacheboost program as a last-ditch effort, even though its credibility is suspect.

On the plus side, The Witcher 3 seems to be running quite well despite an apparent memory leak. So I can enjoy that in lieu of this game for the time being.

I also dropped my Ambient Occlusion from 16x to 8x, but I'm not sure if that's what helped the stutter or not.

Not quite sure what you mean by this. Do you mean the Anisotropic Filtering?


Originally Posted by CarbonFire

Absolutely could be that. This game really likes having large page files, even when you have sufficient RAM. I'm running with an 8GB page file, and the game has been quite stable for me.

When I set my Pagefile to 'system managed' it's saying only 3307mb is allocated for my SSD. I'm wondering if I need to expand my Pagefile now, even though I was advised to put to 'system managed'. That strikes me as low..
 
Top Bottom